UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I executed the following command in the korn shell:
$ variable1="qwerty" ls | sort
and the shell executed the 'ls | sort' command.

I would have expected an error message from the shell, but instead of that the shell ran the 'ls | sort' command and didn't realize the variable assignement.

I would really appreciate if someone could explain to me how the shell interprets this command line.

Thanks for helping.

The shell spawns a subshell to run the command. The subshell creates an environment variable called variable1 and gives it the value qwerty. Then it runs the ls | sort pipeline. If instead of "ls |sort" you had run "env" or "printenv" you would have seen the new variable. But the original shell's environment remains untouched.